“Apple has just issued a software fix through its Beta Software Program to address an issue that arose when the company’s new MacBook Pro laptops were being tested in Consumer Reports‘ labs,” Consumer Reports reports. “Although those computers performed well in tests of display quality, performance, and other factors, we found the battery life to be so variable on the models tested that we could not recommend them to consumers. In our tests of three different MacBook Pro models, we saw battery life results as long as 19.5 hours and as short as 3.75 hours.”

“As a result, these laptops were the first MacBooks not to receive Recommended ratings from Consumer Reports, and the only ones in our ratings of 140 laptops to demonstrate this degree of inconsistency in battery life,” Consumer Reports reports. “We have now downloaded the software fix and are rerunning our battery tests with the fix in place on the same computers previously tested. If the battery life results are consistently high, the ratings score for MacBook Pros would rise, and those laptops will then receive Consumer Reports’ Recommended rating given their performance in all our other evaluations.”

“We communicated our original test results to Apple prior to publication on Dec. 22 and afterward sent multiple rounds of diagnostic data, at the company’s request, to help its engineers understand the battery issues we saw in our testing,” Consumer Reports reports. “After investigating the issue, Apple says that the variable battery performance we experienced is a result of a software bug in its Safari web browser that was triggered by our test conditions.”

“‘We appreciate the opportunity to work with Consumer Reports over the holidays to understand their battery test results,’ Apple said in a statement. ‘We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache… We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test,'” Consumer Reports reports. “Apple says the beta fix will be a part of a broader Software Update available to all MacBook Pro users in a few weeks.”

“In our tests, we want the computer to load each web page as if it were new content from the internet, rather than resurrecting the data from its local drive. This allows us to collect consistent results across the testing of many laptops, and it also puts batteries through a tougher workout,” Consumer Reports reports. “According to Apple, this last part of our testing is what triggered a bug in the company’s Safari browser. Indeed, when we turned the caching function back on as part of the research we did after publishing our initial findings, the three MacBooks we’d originally tested had consistently high battery life results.”

The problem was Consumer Reports‘ testing methodology. Consumer Reports‘ attempt to blame an obscure bug is a copout.

So, good, an obscure bug found within Safari’s “Develop” tools has been found and fixed. We bet CR will now soon recommend Apple’s MacBook Pro to their geriatric readership. Whoopie shit!

Apple’s statement to CR makes it plain: “This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. [Consumer Reports’] use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life.”

This reminds me of something……oh yeah, that guy who drove the Tesla model S around and around till it ran out of juice then proclaimed it didn’t make it to the destination, in the background a picture of the Model S on a tow truck. Tesla checked the “black box” and proved what he had done. The reporter was fired.Apple should make CR pay a similar price.

So CR dioes a test wherein they meddle with the software settings, so they are really not testing the product one buys. They are testing a hacked (in a way) product. The product is a compbination of software and hardware, not one or the other. So once again CR proves they do not know what they are doing when they design the tests for the latest technologies. This was not an Apple bug, it was a CR screw up that Apple has now presummably disabled. Beware of fools reporting test results.

The iPhone Doc didn’t miss anything in the article. There are many reasons that a user would turn off page caching. I take issue with the many asshats who disparage CR for running a consistent test. The test is more valid and repeatable than anything anyone else has proposed. Moreover, CR unearthed an Apple bug that indicates once again how shoddy Apple quality control has become. Thank you CR!

If CR does turn off browser caching as a normal testing practice to test systems with various browsers it should also be stated otherwise you’d be ‘favoring’ MacBook Pro battery results over other laptops they tested in the same way and providing non-comparable data. Not to mention also giving Safari a false ‘good’ rating when it comes to conserving battery resources.

They shouldn’t be using hidden features. If they want all pages to reload then they should set up their own server to generate new content and URLs and/or set up some kind of proxy that sets the flag to disable caching. What would these clowns do if the hidden feature disappeared? What do they do on other platforms?